Even if you printed out the entire contents of the Internet, where would you put all the papers?
Two researchers at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom have figured out how many standard A4 -- 8.3" by 11.7" -- pages it would take to print out the Internet.
It's about 136 billion. That's a lot of paper cuts.
For their estimation, Evangeline Walker and George Harwood, only took into consideration the part of the Web that can be accessed through everyday search engines. The rest, the "Dark Web," was not included.
Even so, the two arrived at their conservative conclusion by assuming there are 4.54 billion pages on the visible Web. And on average, each page required 30 sheets of paper to print.
So, in total, how many trees would this endeavor kill? Walker and Harwood estimate about 16 million, or 0.002% of the Amazon rainforest.
English version sites of Wikipedia would need almost 71 million pages alone, or 8,337 trees.
By contrast, the Library of Congress has "just" 37 million books. If we were extremely generous and said every book had 1,000 pages, that would consist of 37 billion pages -- or less than a quarter of the size of the Web.
